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Tuberculosis and COVID-19

Published on September 29, 2021   27 min

A selection of talks on Respiratory Diseases

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello, I am Professor Giovanni Battista Migliori, Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for TB and Lung Diseases at Maugeri Institute, Tradate, Italy, honorary professor at Queen Mary University in London, and chair of the GTN, the Global Tuberculosis Network. Today we are going to speak about tuberculosis and COVID-19.
0:24
We can see here that the media, as well as newspapers, quite often cover the issue of TB and Covid, and at one time the number of presentations/articles on TB and Covid - particularly on Covid - were overwhelming, following the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. But both in the scientific literature and the mainstream media, it seems that the bigger monster is Covid, and that the main possible victim of the interaction will be TB (as we will see), because of the problems that TB services have faced as a result of COVID-19.
1:09
This is the summary of the presentation. We will briefly revise similarities and differences between COVID-19 and TB. We will revise what the preliminary evidence on the two infections was, before the studies of the Global Tuberculosis Network. We will then describe the main contribution that was made by the GTN with its first studies. We'll discuss mortality, the protection that BCG (the present vaccine for TB) might eventually provide to protect people from COVID-19. We will discuss the impact on health systems, to draw some conclusions at the end.